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From the joint National Public Radio/Pro Publica/FrontLine investigative series on post-mortem investigations in the United States, NPR’s series on wrongful convictions: one report, that of Ernie Lopez, appears to have led to the Texas courts to order Mr. Lopez released pending a new trial. Mr. Lopez was convicted of the murder and sexual assault of a six-month old child Mr. Lopez and his wife were caring for. The government’s case seems to have relied on junk forensic science; Mr. Lopez’s lawyers did not call to testify, and may not even have consulted, any scientific witnesses.

Free, But Not Cleared: Ernie Lopez Comes Home. Here’s the initial report on cases involving child deaths, including that of Ernie Lopez: The Child Cases: Guilty Until Proved Innocent.

Via Popular Logistics.

 

Arrest made in UK Hospital Deaths

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The BBC reports that a nurse has been taken into custody in connection with patient deaths caused by contaminated saline.

A nurse has been arrested on suspicion of murder after the deaths of three patients at a hospital in Stockport, Greater Manchester. Rebecca Leighton, 27, of Heaviley, Stockport, was arrested at home and is being questioned after two men and a woman died at Stepping Hill Hospital.  Police believe insulin was deliberately injected into saline containers.

Sixty detectives have been involved in the inquiry and officers have so far questioned more than 50 people.  Police have been stationed outside Ms Leighton’s flat on Buxton Road, where earlier officers removed six bags of items and a computer.  The Nursing and Midwifery Council said proceedings were under way to suspend her nursing registration while she is under investigation.  On her Facebook page Ms Leighton describes herself as engaged, and calls herself a “happy go lucky kinda gal”.  She states that she is a staff nurse, adding: “god it hard work x”. She adds that she “loves the weekend (if im not workin) and having a laugh with the people that I call friends for a reason x”.

Deaths ‘unexplained’

Tracey Arden, 44, 71-year-old Arnold Lancaster, and George Keep, 84, died at the hospital in the past month.  A  fourth patient, a man in his 40s, remains critically ill.  Greater Manchester Police believe the sabotaged saline containers were used on at least two wards, A1 and A3.  The force said they were working on the assumption the contamination had taken place on site.

The four patients are among a total of 14 whose treatment since 7 July is being examined by police. Dr Chris Burke, chief executive of Stockport NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We are aware that Greater Manchester Police have made an arrest this morning of a 27-year-old female.  ”As the police are continuing with their enquiries, we are unable to provide any further details, but it is important to stress that no charges have been made at this stage.”

A hospital spokesperson said it hoped to return to full business by 0900 BST on Thursday, although security measures would remain in place.   Detectives were called to the hospital after an experienced nurse reported a higher-than-normal number of patients on her ward with “unexplained” low blood sugar levels.   Officers found insulin had been used to contaminate a batch of 36 saline ampoules in a storeroom close to ward A1.  Security has been increased on the hospital site and staff have been told to work in pairs when they check or administer drugs.  Senior NHS bosses at the hospital are having daily meetings with police. Insulin is always stored in a fridge in a locked treatment room but saline has also been locked away as a result of the incidents.

Excerpted from Stepping Hill Hospital: Nurse arrested in murder probe

This fact-pattern presents a number of  difficulties: determining causation (and thereby the number of murdered patients); the number of people with means, knowledge and opportunity (the entire medical staff, some visitors, and some patients – without accounting for delivery personnel, equipment maintainers, etc.), the absence of a rational or “ordinary” motive (greed, domestic relationship) plus the fact that, if a member of the medical staff, the accused is likely to be high-functioning and may be perceived – by at least some colleagues and patients – as a person of good or excellent character.

 

 

 

UK police report hospital deaths resulting from intentional tampering with saline solution

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We hope to be able to address the difficult investigative and evidentiary issues when available evidence suggests criminal behavior on the part of a hospital employee.  Some may remember the physician Michael Swango (Wikipedia entry Michael_Swango), who – depending on complicated comparisons between certan and presumed cases – may be the most prolific serial killer in United States history.  But at the moment, according to BBC reporting, UK police are closer to the beginning than the conclusion of a difficult investigation.  From Police investigate three deaths at Stepping Hill Hospital:

The deaths of three patients at a Stockport hospital are being investigated after a batch of contaminated saline was found.

Police said an inquiry into the deaths of two people was extended following the death of an 84-year-old man

All three – including another man aged 71 and a woman, 44 – were patients at Stepping Hill Hospital.

Staff alerted police on Tuesday after finding vials of saline solution had been tampered with.

A further 11 people are believed to have been affected by the incident but were not seriously harmed as a result.

The discovery came after several patients suffered lower than normal blood sugar levels.

‘Deliberate contamination’

Assistant Chief Constable Terry Sweeney said: “Greater Manchester Police’s priority is to prevent any further harm to patients.

“We have recovered a number of ampoules of solution and are working closely with the hospital to try and get to the bottom of what has happened.”

He said all deaths at the hospital meeting certain criteria would be referred to the coroner adding: “It is important that people are clear in their minds that, as things stand, we do not know for sure if the contaminated saline contributed to the deaths of these three people.

“That said we have someone deliberately contaminating saline in the one place that people should feel they are being most cared for.”

We’ll try to keep up with this case, and perhaps revisit the Swango case by way of comparison.




								
 



		

				
	

		
	
		
		
	

	
		

						
Was the evidence in the Strauss-Kahn case initially misread?


			
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William Saletan, writing at Salon, has written a good piece which contains a concise summary of the  initial accusation,  and how, less than two months later (Strauss-Kahn was arrested on May 14th),  the evidence now in the public record is still consistent with the possibility of a sexual assault, but replete with reasons to think that the complainant isn’t someone upon whose testimony we’d want to rely. Salitan on the original case as reported in the press,


New York authorities arrested Strauss-Kahn on May 14 in part because they trusted his accuser, a housekeeper at the hotel where the incident took place. She had reported the incident right away. Her account was detailed and, according to prosecutors, “compelling.” She seemed devoutly religious. She had held the same job for several years. But she also had corroborating evidence. Hotel security officers found semen on the wall and floor of the hotel room. Prosecutors told the judge that an “expert forensic examination of the victim was consistent with her version of events.” Reportedly, this included a DNA match between Strauss-Kahn and semen on the woman’s shirt. An official says the exam also found vaginal bruising.


But bruising alone doesn’t prove rape. And semen only proves sex, which Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers never denied. So the case seemed likely to boil down to he-said-she-said. And that’s scary, because without corroborating evidence, there’s a high risk of terrible injustice. A guilty man might get away with rape. Or an innocent man might be convicted.


Saletan’s description of the complainant’s credibility as of July 2nd:


The first test, according to a June 30 letter from the district attorney’s office, is the woman’s previous application for asylum, submitted to the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 2004. In it, she claimed to have suffered persecution, beating, and incarceration in her native Guinea. After Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, investigators asked the woman about her life in Guinea. Her story didn’t match what she had reported in the application. According to the letter, she admitted to investigators that what she had reported on the application was false.


The next test is her tax returns. They show that for two years, she has padded her refund by claiming as a dependent a child who turns out to be a friend’s child, not hers.


Then there’s the income she has reported in order to qualify for public housing. Apparently, it doesn’t check out. According to the letter, she has now “admitted to misrepresenting her income” for this purpose.


You can argue that these discrepancies are understandable, minor, or irrelevant. But according to the New York Times, a day after accusing Strauss-Kahn, the woman placed a phone call to her boyfriend. The call was recorded, evidently because the boyfriend was in a detention center after being arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana. Apparently, authorities were unaware of the call until several days later, when they learned from another recorded call, between the boyfriend and another man, that the boyfriend’s paramour was the woman in the Strauss-Kahn case. The phone call from the woman was conducted in a Guinean dialect, so the DA’s office had to get the recording translated. The translation, completed on Wednesday, reportedly shows her saying, in the paraphrase of a law enforcement official: “Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing.”


It’s clear that the initial  allegation might  still be true – but it’s hard to imagine a reasonable judge or jury not finding reasonable doubt, given the complaining witness’ history of false statements and her motive to fabricate.


The more interesting question is – given the same facts but an unknown defendant with no resources – would the case have progressed as it did? The mere entry into the case of Ben Brafman – widely regarded as one  of the best criminal defense lawyers in New York – must have put the prosecutors on notice that they weren’t getting an easy plea. From there in, the government had a great incentive to conduct a quick and aggressive investigation for the best reason of all – to avoid being surprised. They also are likely to have assumed, correctly,  that Brafman’s team included first-class investigators  and experts. In a sense, it doesn’t matter which investigators got to which piece of evidence first, assuming that the government was and is complying with its Brady obligations.


What is a problem is this: what’s the difference in the quality of both defense and prosecution functions in cases which don’t  make the news, and the Strauss-Kahn case. The ugly truth is that while it appears that Mr. Strauss-Kahn was falsely accused, the system seems to be working for him.  For those of us who work on criminal cases – in whatever capacity  – who among us can say that the system works this well for other defendants?



								
 



		

				
	

		
	
		
		
	

	
		

						
NPR/Frontline/Pro Publica project suggests widespread error in attributing infant death to foul play, negligence


			
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A joint project of National Public Radio, the PBS television show Frontline, and the independent journalism organization Pro Publica suggest troubling deficiencies in the conduct  of death investigations in the United States. Excerpted from The Child Cases: Guilty Until Proven Innocent, NPR’s version of  the piece:


An investigation by NPR, ProPublica and PBS Frontline has found that medical examiners and coroners have repeatedly mishandled cases of infant and child deaths, helping to put innocent people behind bars.


 We analyzed nearly two dozen cases in the United States and Canada in which people have been accused of killing children based on flawed or biased work by forensic pathologists, and then later cleared. Some spent years in prison before courts overturned their convictions. In 2004, San Diego prosecutors moved to dismiss charges against a man who’d been imprisoned for two decades for murdering his girlfriend’s son.  Others were freed more swiftly but endured hardships nonetheless. An El Paso, Texas, jury acquitted a woman of killing her child in 2010, but after spending 22 months in the county jail, she still had to wage a legal battle to regain custody of her other children.


 The questionable prosecutions identified in our joint investigation had common elements:


Often, authorities had little to go on other than autopsy findings. Many of the doctors who conducted post-mortem examinations failed to consult specialists in childhood injuries or ailments, or to thoroughly review medical records that could have affected their conclusions. In several cases, forensic pathologists worked so closely with authorities, they effectively became agents of law enforcement, rather than objective arbiters of scientific evidence.


 Some experts in the field say worries about mistakes in child death cases are overstated. “The vast majority of forensic pathologists recognize a child abuse case when they see it, and it’s not because they want to persecute people,” said Mary Case, chief medical examiner for four Missouri counties including St. Louis County.


 But others say the criminal justice system has yet to confront the full scope of the problem, and that, as a result, more innocent people may be serving time for crimes they didn’t commit. “I think it’s time to look at these cases again,” said Michael Laposata, chief pathologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, adding that this could “result in the liberation of a number of falsely accused people.”


There’s more, including the audio version of the piece, and a transcript, on the NPR website – link above. Further resources


 



 


 








								
 



		

				
	

		
	
		
		
	

	
		

						
ProPublica: examination of coroner and medical examiner offices reveals a troubled system that literally buries its mistakes.


			
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Via Alternet, this story, jointly produced by Pro Publica, FrontLine, and NPR:


The Real CSI: How America’s Patchwork System of Death Investigations Puts the Living At Risk by A.C. Thompson and                                     Mosi Secret and                                     Lowell Bergman and                                     Sandra Bartlett . Here’s an excerpt:




In detective novels and television  crime dramas like “CSI,” the nation’s morgues are staffed by highly  trained medical professionals equipped with the most sophisticated tools  of 21st-century science. Operating at the nexus of medicine and  criminal justice, these death detectives thoroughly investigate each and  every suspicious fatality.


The  reality, though, is far different. In a joint reporting effort,  ProPublica, PBS “Frontline” and NPR spent a year looking at the nation’s  2,300 coroner and medical examiner offices and found a deeply  dysfunctional system that quite literally buries its mistakes.


Blunders by doctors in America’s  morgues have put innocent people in prison cells, allowed the guilty to  go free, and left some cases so muddled that prosecutors could do  nothing.


In Mississippi, a  physician’s errors  in two autopsies helped convict a pair of innocent men, sending  them to prison for more than a decade.


The Massachusetts medical  examiner’s office has cremated a corpse before police could determine if  the person had been murdered; misplaced bones; and lost track of at  least five bodies.


Late last  year, a doctor in a suburb of Detroit autopsied the body of a bank  executive pulled from a lake — and managed to miss the bullet hole in  his neck and the bullet lodged in his jaw.


“I thought it was a superficial autopsy,” said Dr. David  Balash, a forensic science consultant and former Michigan state trooper  hired by the Macomb County Sheriff’s Department to evaluate the case.  “You see a lot of these kinds of things, unfortunately.”


 


More than 1 in 5 physicians working in  the country’s busiest morgues — including the chief medical examiner  of Washington, D.C. — are not board certified in forensic pathology,  the branch of medicine focused on the mechanics of death, our  investigation found. Experts say such certification ensures that doctors  have at least a basic understanding of the science, and it should be  required for practitioners employed by coroner and medical examiner  offices.


Yet, because of an extreme  shortage of forensic pathologists — the country has fewer than half the  specialists it needs, a 2009  report by the National Academy of Sciences concluded — even  physicians who flunk their board exams find jobs in the field.  Uncertified doctors who have failed the exam are employed by county  offices in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and California, officials in  those states acknowledged. Two of the six doctors in Arkansas’ state  medical examiner’s office have failed the test, according to the  agency’s top doctor.


In many  places, the person tasked with making the official ruling on how people  die isn’t a doctor at all. In nearly 1,600 counties across the country,  elected or appointed coroners who may have no qualifications beyond a  high-school degree have the final say on whether fatalities are  homicides, suicides, accidents or the result of natural or undetermined  causes.


 



								
 



		

				
	

		
	
		
		
	

	
		

						
Faurot Forensics – source for latent fingerprint collection, examination


			
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Faurot Forensics Products is – to our knowledge – the  

leading and perhaps oldest maker of latent fingerprint equipment in the United States. Their latent print field kits range from $24 (the Latent Mini Kit) to $439.50 for the C.S.I. Kit. They also sell Optical Equipment and Magnifiers specifically chosen for their utility in examining and comparing prints, and casting and impressions equipment, and other forensics equipment.